Re: Proper Support Methods

by

Landis Arnold

- 19/08/2016 18:38:40

Dave,

A big and important question.

My recomendation, is to have a github/oca/support repository which functions as a OCA community place to see, get and give feedback. One advantage to this is that folks would not need to subscribe to every issue, but they could check in to it and also have cross reference with specific issues to the various active development repositories.

A big advantage to this I feel is to have users see and have some contact with the extensive work that goes into building, maintaining and improving the OCA software.

Another advantage is to not have "support requests" hit the developer's email box every time a specific issue is raised. Perhaps there would be a way to "forward" out of development issue stack into the support community.

I agree with most other posts in the reference thread that the Odoo Help Forum is difficult at best, and generally less effective still when community modules are referenced. Some help is given and found there but much is not answered. Issues of having Karma and other details to their system, likewise, don't make sense in a community support effort (IMHO).

One of the big goals that there should be is to get users to provide effective support rather than primarily relying on the great work and knowledge of the developers (who do, of course, tend to know the most). I would imagine there could be a good documentation effort take place within the context of GitHub Wikis as well.

OCA could have a Forum not On Git Hub, but I do think an "issue" format in a GitHub repository that References various other Repos using tags is a more Organic approach and would yield the greatest support web. Whatever is used, however, it needs to be well referenced so people know where to best ask and answer questions that people have.

Thanks to all of you for your great work. I am full of admiration and am happy to be a support helper if I am not a developer right now.

A conversation started in #190 regarding then proper consumers of our products should be taking in order to obtain help for those products. The conversation was a bit out of scope for the PR, so I am bringing it here now.

As it stands now, the desired avenue of support is not clear for OCA, which is causing confusion as well as a fracture of our resources. A few suggestions have been laid out; apologies if I missed anything:

OCA Help Forum

This proposed support avenue involves OCA hosting and maintaining a forum on odoo-community.org. All requests for help will be directed to these forums.

The advantage here is that the forums will be under our control, which will allow us to create automations and other integrations to systems we already have.

Disadvantage is that we will require administrators and moderators to manage this solution. It may also create an ambiguity of resources for newcomers, with two help forums “for Odoo”.

Odoo Help Forum

This solution utilizes the pre-existing Odoo help forum as an OCA help forum as well.

The advantage of this is that they already exist and have a decent amount of valuable info on them.

The disadvantage here is that I have not actually found anything helpful on these forums, and find the format atrocious. It seems there is consensus in the community regarding this.

Mailing Lists

This solution utilizes an OCA mailing list to provide a support avenue.

The advantage here is familiarity and ease of setup. We already have the mailing lists, and basically everyone knows how to use email.

The disadvantage is that the thread format of an email gets broken quite often, and the mailing list archives are essentially impossible to navigate. They will also avoid Google pretty well because of the Parent=>Child format of Odoo mailing lists.

Stack Overflow

This solution utilizes a subdomain, or tag on stack overflow for Odoo/OCA.

The advantage here is again familiarity, and abundance of pre-existing resources.

The disadvantage is that StackOverflow is a purely technical, programming oriented Q&A forum. Simple theories or non-researched questions will be closed by the mods.